Chinese American studies and identity

Chinese-American Studies: Wen Ho Lee Case

United States of America is a melting pot of various communities who have been residing in the country for generations. They feel assimilated into the American culture where many of them have been born and brought up in the U.S. And hence have remote connections with the country of their ancestors. As a result, they feel very much a part of this country and believe they have the rights of a citizen. This is why they feel that they do not deserve to be discriminated against on the grounds of their origins. Therefore such communities protest if situations arise, where they feel they have been discriminated against in some or the other. Though United States confers all rights of citizenry to its nationals, there have been cases in the past where the U.S. government has discriminated against a person or a group on the basis of their origins. One such event occurred within the Chinese-American community when Wen Ho Lee was terminated from employment in March 1999 from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is a bureau, which is under the administration of and is thus funded by the United States Department of Energy and operated by the University of California. LANL is responsible for the research, design, development and safe keeping for around 85% of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. LANL is located within the State and District of New Mexico. LANL is further divided into many departments or divisions. One such department, named X Division needs special mention in the Wen Ho Lee case. The X Division at LANL has responsibility for the research, design and development of thermonuclear weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Thus the X Division has been allocated the highest level of security of any division at LANL. Wen HO Lee, a resident of New Mexico was assigned to this X Division at LANL as a hydrodynamicist/engineer in 1980. He stayed here till December 23, 1998 when was transferred from the X Division to an unclassified area within another division at LANL. While employed at LANL in the X Division, Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese-American, was assigned a Q. clearance. This allowed him complete access to Top Secret information and Restricted Data information. Restricted Data, as defined in the 42 U.S.C. 2014(y), means all data related to the design, manufacture or utilization of atomic weapons, to the production of special nuclear material or the use of special nuclear material in the production of energy. Restricted Data is further categorized into Secret Restricted Data (SRD) and Confidential Restricted Data (CRD). Secret Restricted Data (SRD) and Confidential Restricted Data (CRD) apply to all those types of information whose unauthorized disclosure could bring serious harm to national security. Hence SRD information is the most closely guarded type of information within the X Division at LANL. It were the unauthorized transfer of these SRD and CRD files that Dr. Wen Ho Lee was charged with in 1999. The Grand Jury charged him with 59 counts on the following allegations (www.fas.org).

THE CASE: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA VS. WEN HO LEE

The government stated that in 1993 and 1994, Dr. Lee collected SRD and CRD material contained in classified files on the Secure network. He then arranged the SRD and CRD material into TAR files and then transferred the SRD and CRD TAR files to one of his Open green directories on the CFS within the green partition. Moreover Dr. Lee transferred some files from red to green partitions, and then assembled the TAR file in the open network on a green machine, and later saved it to the green CFS. "TAR File" is actually an archive folder where files are arranged by the file creator. Open Green, Red etc. are references to security partitions in the LANL computing environment which require different level of handling by the employees of the LANL department. LANL consisted of four security partitions, with each partition having an assigned associated color. The four partitions were the Open (green), the Administrative (blue), the National Security (yellow), and the Secure (red). Hence the words green and red mean the Open and Secure partitions respectively. The Open partition is used only for normal access where users are not required to have a security clearance. The Secure partition allowed both classified and unclassified computing, but only by personnel with Q. clearances. The Common File System (CFS) refers to a single archival data storage system, which constitutes the partitions. CFS includes an Open (green) system and a Secure (red) system on separate networks where it works by allowing lower classification level work to be performed in higher security partitions while preventing files with higher classification levels from being accessed on the Open partition.

Dr. Lee was charged with the specific transfer of classified files from the Secure red partition to the Open green partition. Furthermore between January 20, 1999 and February 10, 1999, Dr. Lee deleted over 360 files that he had maintained in his green partition directories on the Open CFS. Among these files were the 19 previously designated SRD and CRD TAR files that he had moved from the Secure red partition to the Open green partition, or arranged on the Open green partition after transfer from the Secure red partition. Moreover, Dr. Lee was also charged with transferring SRD material to cassette cartridges (www.fas.org).In short, "a grand jury issued a 59-count felony indictment that charged him with tampering, altering and concealing classified information, as well as with removing secret weapons files from the Los Alamos computers...in addition, 7 of 10 high-volume tapes Lee [was] accused of filling with nuclear computer codes [were] still missing" (www.asianweek.com).Furthermore, the FBI was concerned over the probable idea that Lee had leaked information about the W-88 warhead. However after solitary confinement which lasted for nine months, Dr. Wen Ho Lee, the Taiwanese-born U.S. nuclear weapons scientist was freed on September 13, 1999, by a Court in Sante Fe, New Mexico, after pleading guilty to one charge of mishandling classified information. The remaining 58 charges against him were dropped (www.imdiversity.com/article_detail.asp?Article_ID=15).

Dr. Lee's case, and the unjust conditions of his captivity had attracted huge attention in the U.S. And internationally, and especially within the Chinese-American community who believed that the grounds of Dr. Lee's arrest were racial prejudice. In the beginning, the U.S. Energy Department, Justice Department, and the FBI, all stated that Dr. Lee was involved in a criminal activity by refusing to "to tell investigators the location and intended destination of classified material copied onto missing computer tapes." However with the end of the case, the official statements had pretty much changed. For instance, U.S. District Court Judge James Parker said that he believed Dr. Lee was " terribly wronged by being held in custody pretrial in the Santa Fe County Detention Center under demeaning, unnecessarily punitive conditions." Judge Parker's apology was followed by President Clinton's statement who said that he "always had reservations" about the claims that were presented against Dr. Lee. However, the Chinese-American community, by then had become quite suspicious of the government and its motives; as henry Tang, President of the Committee of 100, a Chinese-American Group campaigning for Dr. Lee's release stated. Despite the official apologies, he maintained that "efforts to find out if there is ethnic profiling at the labs should continue," voicing concern of the Chinese-American community (www.fas.org).

Chinese-American and/or Asian-American Community and Its Involvement in the Case

The Chinese-American or Asian-American community has reacted angrily to the Wen-ho Lee episode. The Taiwanese born scientist suspected by the U.S. government of transferring American nuclear secrets to China, has mobilized an outrage against what the Asian-Americans claim has been a racial discrimination (www.imdiversity.com/article_detail.asp?Article_ID=216),(www.imdiversity.com/article_detail.asp?Article_ID=84).Anger against the U.S. government is more visible in the Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay Area, where Chinese-American scientists make up the 70% of the total. Hence the leaders of this community have demanded more than a mere acquittal for Dr. Lee. They believe that the Lee's career and reputation have been ruined and that a mere dismissal of charges will not bring it back. Furthermore the Asian-American community across the United States is demanding that since the Justice Department could not prove the charges made against Lee, they should investigate and prosecute those who were responsible for putting Dr. Lee in such a position. They feel it is the only way that things can be set right for the Los Alamos scientist against the injustice and the consequent humiliation he has suffered which the Asian-Americans will never forget. As a result of the Asian-American reaction to the case, the government has gone back on its charges filed against Dr. Lee. Moreover the Justice Department security chief John Dion claims that he had earlier on warned his superiors not to proceed with prosecuting Lee due to lack of evidence. The acquittal of Dr. Lee was also followed by the resignation of Notra Trulock, deputy director of intelligence in the Department of Energy who had initiated the investigation against Lee.

Not only did the common Asian-American feel outraged, but also the leaders of this community who were very outspoken in demanding that Dr. Lee be compensated in some way. Former UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-lin Tien, the first Asian-American scientist appointed to the National Science Council, stated that the case was at a critical juncture after Lee's acquittal. As a result, instead of letting go of the issue, the Asian-Americans should unite and demand a complete investigation of the Wen-ho Lee affair. He believed that the community has a right to know if there were any racist reasons behind Lee's prosecution; since if there were any, the community should not tolerate and demand justice. Tien also believed that it was the initial protests by the Asian-American community, which finally helped in turning "the tide of media coverage away from blatant acceptance of his guilt to a less biased, more open-ended approach." This could be seen through the different programs that went on air. For instance CBS's 60 minutes aired an interview with Lee which allowed him to give his side of story. Following this, the Washington Post ran an interview with Robert S. Vrooman, head of counter-intelligence at the Los Alamos National Research Lab, in which Vrooman stated that racism was the actual reason behind Lee's prosecution by the Energy Department.

There are also pockets of Chinese-American individuals who abstain from commenting against the U.S. government but nevertheless believe that the case was based on racial grounds.

Professor Ling-chi Wang, head of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, is one such individual. However Wang wants the community to file a lawsuit on Wen-ho Lee's behalf and on behalf of all those Chinese-American scientists and engineers he believes might be the future targets of the government's anti-espionage campaign. Wang's idea is not a mere reactionary one. In fact it has much legal grounds. Paul M. Igasaki, deputy director of the Federal Equal Opportunity Employment Council, believes that the Chinese-American community has all the legal rights to either initiate an investigation or bring a lawsuit against the U.S. government. This is so because the loyalty of many Chinese-American engineers with America has been questioned up front, which is against the law.

The reason the Chinese-American community is so bent upon taking legal action is because of the repeated cases that the community has experienced in the past. One such example is that of Hu Chi Min, a former physicist at NASA who was the target of an FBI investigation 17 years ago. Though no charges were ever filed against him, the investigation resulted in NASA terminating him from employment with them. Furthermore, he experienced domestic problems because of the investigation resulting in the failure of his marriage. With the Wen Ho Lee case damaging the repute of yet another scientist, Hu Chi Min has considered filing a class action lawsuit on behalf of himself, Lee and other Asian-American scientists and engineers, charging that the government has singled them out for a discriminatory treatment on the racial basis. He added that he had a sufficient number of opinions backing his claim where the lawyers he consulted agreed that a certain racist stereotype was applied to these professionals which was similar in essence, to the racist profiling police use against blacks for example.

Furthermore, there are some who believe that if the Asian-American community fails to take any action, not only would Dr. Lee be insulted but also the days he has spent in custody would go to waste. For instance, Lester Lee, the first Asian-American regent at the University of California stated that the entire community should support Dr. Lee. This could be witnessed in the open support of Lee by the Asian-American community in different ways. For instance some of the people belonging to the Chinese-American community started a fund raising campaign to help Lee fight the case. Moreover the Committee of One Hundred, a group of high-profile Chinese-Americans that includes architect I.M. Pei, cellist Yo Ma, former Delaware State Lieutenant-Governor S.B. Woo and others came together to raise funds in order to help Lee. The Chinese-American Benevolent Association also contributed whereby some $10,000 was raised and a committee was set up to plan a legal strategy. Some Chinese-American luminaries stated that distinguished Chinese-American societies could support Lee. Professor Ling-chi Wang said "Chinese For Affirmative Action" could provide leadership for the legal strategy. The CFAA could also help bring all Chinese-American groups together and set up a reserve fund (Dan).

It is important to note here that such a reaction has taken place because the Lee case has managed to arouse the "wrath of the country's most self-effacing and soft-spoken minority, Asian-Americans." According to some, the Lee case is similar to the Dreyfus case and what it had meant for the French Jews a century ago. This is because, in both cases, reality hit the leaders of the respective communities where they "were jolted out of a complacent optimism over their prospects for assimilation" because of the injustice one of them have had to experience for belonging to a race different than the country's majority.